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October 22, 2012

We're posting this week's Election Tuesday piece a bit early because it directly relates to the final presidential debate. David L. Phillips, author of Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and U. S. Intervention, discusses the candidates' stances on foreign policy and urges them to consider important lessons from America’s recent experiences.

Obama and Romney clashed during
the presidential debate on foreign policy. Romney accused Obama of being weak
and apologizing for American values. He accused Obama of failing to support
Iran’s pro-democracy movement, thereby empowering the mullahs. He also blasted
the Obama administration for failing to provide adequate security at U.S.
diplomatic facilities, lamenting the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens and insinuating
a cover-up of Al Qaeda’s role in the Benghazi attack.

Obama adamantly defended his conduct
of foreign policy. Noting that his primary responsibility is keeping the
country safe, Obama discussed the killing of Osama bin Laden and drone attacks
against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. He highlighted the
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, as promised.

Despite sharp rhetoric, the
debate revealed striking areas of agreement between the candidates. Both
pledged to prevent Iran from gaining the capabilities to develop a nuclear
weapon. Both promised support to Israel and a two-state solution. Both
committed to withdraw forces from Afghanistan by 2014.

On Syria, differences were
nuanced. Obama and Romney took turns beating up on Bashar al-Assad, pledging
support for secular opposition groups that share America’s values. Romney
criticized Obama’s minimal and indirect intervention, pledging to arm the
Syrian opposition through Arab allies (e.g. Saudi Arabia and Qatar). Obama was
more circumspect about transferring sophisticated weapons, lest they fall into
the hands of Jihadis, who would use them against U.S. interests.

Short on specifics, neither candidate
discussed intervention criteria or the responsibility that accompanies military
action. As the prospective future
leaders of the United States weigh options for U.S. intervention, they should
consider important lessons from America’s recent experience.

Liberating Kosovo: Coercive Diplomacy and U.S. Intervention examines
such lessons through the case of Kosovo, which can be applied to challenges
faced by the United States today in Syria, Libya and Afghanistan. It offers guidelines on intervention: why,
when, how and with whom? It emphasizes cajoling and coercion, so confrontation
is the last resort. It also addresses winning the peace through reconstruction,
which focus on jobs and sustainable development. A successful exit strategy requires
a credible local partner with the capacity to stand-up as the United States
stands-down. When facing these
challenges, the next U.S. president will be judged by his actions, not but his
words.

Common
wisdom says that Mitt Romney won the first debate because he was “energetic”
while the President appeared “lethargic.” It certainly destroys any
lingering myth that presidential elections are about actual policy; despite the
best efforts of the fact-checkers, impression trumps policy every time. Besides, let’s be honest: most people would rather not have a drawn-out
discussion of tax plans. Big Bird’s possible unemployment is so much more
amusing.

Overall,
the debate was about as interesting and informative as a 90 minute lecture on
macroeconomics given by a C student.

At
least the Vice Presidential Debate had some fireworks. Of course, the “policy
debate” still came down to dueling platitudes and mischaracterizations, and it
will have less impact on voters than an Election Day rainstorm over Ohio and
Pennsylvania. But it made for good television; and, honestly, that’s what
both the media and the voters really care about.

Now the focus is back on the top of the ticket. Moving forward, the worry for the candidates is that Romney’s performance was not
as dominant, and Obama’s not as bad, as many pundits have been
portraying. It isn’t entirely the media’s fault: we would all rather hear
about “Obama’s Debacle” than about “Obama’s Mediocre Performance.” But
this creates danger. Governor Romney must now deal with raised
expectations. People may now expect him to dominate each of the next two
debates in a way that he didn’t really dominate the first one. Romney’s campaign needs to dampen expectations as much as possible, lest he find
himself facing an impossible hurdle. Meanwhile, President Obama has to
avoid overreacting to his mistakes. His basic strategy was sound: be the
more likable candidate, avoid major gaffes, and let Romney make his own
mistakes. Just do it with a bit more zest.

October 09, 2012

There
are few things in the world that better evidence the importance of social
learning—the I’ll Have What She’s Having (IHWSH) effect of our book of the same title—than democratic elections, particularly presidential elections. At the same
time, they reveal our culture’s deep ambivalence about IHWSH and copying.

We
tell ourselves that pursuing our democratic rights means each and every one of
us having our own private say on who should be leading us and spending our tax
dollars, but the lengths we go to in order to ensure that the votes we cast are
indeed the votes of free and independently-minded individuals suggest that we
suspect that human nature might be working in the other direction. Consider the
privacy of the polling booth, the elaborate machinery we develop to reduce human
error (and the complex human protocols to ensure there is none), the
(debatable) limits on campaign expenditure, the labyrinthine procedural legal
frameworks within which we manage the Great Big Vote.

Indeed, many countries go further: for example, the UK is one of those
countries in which exit polls may not be published while the polls are still
open. Germany and India are unlikely bedfellows, but both are tougher still—they
have strict limits on the publication of opinion polls of any sort in the latter
stages of elections.

And
rightly so. Whether or not lawmakers behind this legal framework realized what
they were doing, both of these types of banned information syntheses provide
the rest of us with an example to follow—in uncertain decision-landscapes (as
the jargon has it), they provide very good proxies for “what she’s having.”

Indeed,
despite our best efforts, support for political parties and candidates is a
very social phenomenon. Hence the heavy use in our politics of rallies (large
gatherings of enthusiasts which give the impression of popularity), celebrity
and VIP endorsements (former Presidents and Hollywood A-listers, please form an
orderly line), and our obsession with the ever-elusive “momentum” that spin doctors
seek for their candidate—momentum is
a reflection of which way other people (including the media pundits) are
shifting in their views and intentions. Again, a great shorthand for working
out where to land your own vote.

Hence
also the notion of “class” (i.e. group or tribal) politics and political views
as a badge of shared social identity. Indeed, the depth of political divide,
which the last few years in Washington has been characterized, is a reflection
of a larger tribalization of opinions and culture across the US. As Bill
Bishop’s excellent The Big Sort points
out, we have sorted ourselves out into mutually misunderstanding and
mistrusting electorates.

Another
big clue to the importance of #IHWSH in shaping US politics is the clustering of opinions and positions around
issues— Low Taxes, Small State, Gun Control, and Right to Life all seem to go
together because they have come to reflect a group identity. Most discussions
or debates on these issues immediately defaults to the preset position of those
involved; sometimes, as Bishop points out, even encouraging a more extreme
position thanks to what social psychologists call the “risky shift.”

Oscar Wilde was mostly right when he observed,“…most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's
opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

The
difference between Oscar and us is that we don’t see this as essentially a bad
thing (he despaired of the common man’s lack of originality). In our view, in politics
as in life, IHWSH is large part of how we decide, when we’re left to our own
individual—social—devices.

October 02, 2012

This week's Election Tuesday post is by Robert Pollin, author of Back to Full Employment. Pollin tackles the issue of job creation, claiming that the real discussion about rebuilding the economy around job opportunity creation will have to come not from the candidates, but from an engaged citizenry.

As a result of the 2008-09 Wall
Street crash and Great Recession, employment conditions in the United States
have been worse than at any time since the 1930s Depression. As of the most recent August data, the official
unemployment rate is 8.1 percent. A better
official measure—which includes people who have been discouraged from looking
for work and those taking part-time jobs (sometimes very part-time) when they
wanted full time—puts unemployment as of August at 14.7 percent. That is 23 million people, nearly double the
combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles.

Based on
historical experience, a U.S. president running for reelection would be tossed
out by voters in the face of such disastrous employment figures. But polls show that President Obama is
maintaining a small but firm edge over Mitt Romney, and that, if anything, the
margin is widening with time.

In part, we
can attribute this to both Romney’s ineptitude as a candidate and to the
hard-right politics advanced by Tea Party Republicans. But even accounting for these factors, I
would still venture that, while most voters do not believe that Obama and the
Democrats offer anything close to a coherent plan for overcoming mass
unemployment, they also understand that the Republicans—with their full
throttle embrace of an austerity agenda—have even less to offer.

The
situation was different during the 2008 Presidential campaign. At that time, Obama’s “hope” mantra conveyed,
if only vaguely, that he had a serious platform for counteracting the financial
crisis and recession. The fact is, Obama
did indeed have a plan and he managed to implement significant parts of it soon
after taking office in 2009. His big
initiatives were the $800 billion stimulus program and the auto industry bailout. For all their deficiencies, these programs
did succeed to a substantial extent. The
problem was that the full magnitude of the financial collapse was beyond what
the Obama team had estimated (and, full disclosure, beyond what I myself had initially
calculated). In addition, Obama gave himself little room to maneuver beyond
these initial actions, primarily because he kept trying too hard to avoid
offending the Wall Street crowd.

The moment
cries out for serious discussions throughout the country on how to dig out of
the ditch Wall Street has shoved the economy, and how to rebuild the economy
around a commitment to creating decent job opportunities for everyone. Don’t expect to hear much about this during
the rest of the campaign. The real
discussion will have to come from the bottom up, from an engaged citizenry,
pushing to create the foundations of a decent U.S. society.

September 25, 2012

In the following Election Tuesday post, Michael P. Lynch, author of In Praise of Reason, explains why we need shared standards of reason.

The Romney campaign declared last month that they weren’t
going to be pushed around by fact-checkers. Such remarks were in turns horrifying
and amusing to many, but their open acceptance by some on the Right was
revealing. What it reveals is that current political disputes aren’t just over
the facts. They are also over who has the best methods and way for determining what
the facts are. And many on the Right are suspicious of “fact-checking” as just
another way of using biased methods to impose a liberal view of the world.

This is frustrating. But rejecting it wholesale without
trying to understand the underlying problem is a mistake. The real problem here
is that when we can’t even agree over fact-finding methods, then we are
disagreeing over our very standards of reason—over what counts as rational or
justified and what doesn’t. And when
that happens, we’ve hit rock bottom—the debate has grounded out on principles
so basic it is hard to see how it can be resolved because neither side sees the
other as rational.

Democracies are supposed to be spaces of reasons. In
democratic politics, we ought to give and ask for reasons for our political
views. In order to do that, however, we need some common currency of shared standards—some
common principles to which we can all appeal when assessing each other’s
claims. Without that, reason-giving breaks down and politics becomes war by
other means. And that is what is happening in our country right now.

What this means is that
those of us who favor scientific methods can’t be content with just heaping
scorn on the other’s sides standards of rationality. Nor should we assume that
everyone will just see the virtues of a scientific approach to evidence and
reason. We need to do more, to actively how why—morally and politically and not
just scientifically—some standards of reason are more rational than others.
Ignore this, and we run the risk of more people giving up not only on
fact-checkers—but the facts themselves.

September 20, 2012

The political news this week has been dominated by a secret film of Mitt Romney speaking in May at a fundraising event in Florida. In it, Romney, speaking "off the cuff," described a bloc of Americans that support President Obama:

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.

The remarks have generated a heated discussion about "the 47%" - who they are, how they vote, and the role of the government. We thought we should check in with Peter Wenz, author of Take Back the Center, a new book arguing for the return of a progressive tax code. Not surprisingly, he saw little of value in Romney's remarks:

If Mitt Romney had read Take Back the Center he’d have known better than to suppose that the 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay any federal income tax are loafers looking for government handouts. In the first place, they pay other taxes and therefore support the government. If they have a job, they pay into the Social Security and Medicare funds. If they’re unemployed they still pay sales taxes and property taxes (either directly to the government or indirectly to their landlords).

Most of the 47 percent depend on Social Security after a lifetime of work, or are employed at jobs that pay less than a living wage. Workers who clean motel rooms, wait on tables at Denny’s, cashier at grocery stores, or greet customers at Walmart typically pay no income tax if they have dependents. Walmart actually instructs its new workers on how to apply for such government benefits as subsidized housing, free school lunches for their kids, and food assistance for their home. Walmart knows that it doesn’t pay a living wage. The family of its founder, by contrast, the Walton family, has assets of $69 billion, which just about equals the assets of the entire bottom 30 percent of the U.S. population.

Romney seems to imagine that rich people who pay a significant amount of income tax are supporting the government by dint of their own hard work. He neglects to notice how handsomely the government is supporting them. All of the beneficiaries of businesses that pay less than a living wage are being supplied workers by government subsidy. Without housing and food assistance, poor people would be too busy trying to stay warm, feed themselves, and keep out the rain to show up to make beds at motels, wait on tables, or greet customers at Walmart.

More directly, the government supports whole industries with tax dollars. Most basic research is done by the government and then turned over to private enterprise at little cost. So anyone making money from computers, cell phones, and the Internet, all resulting from government research, is a beneficiary of government favor. Basic medical research is done for the most part by government-supported institutions, which is an enormous subsidy of the pharmaceutical industry. An additional subsidy is the provision of Medicare Part D that disallows the government from bargaining for lower drug prices. The constraint on bargaining costs taxpayers about $50 billion a year.

Mining companies pay below-market rates for extractions from government-owned land, and ranchers and farmers in the west pay below-market rates for the water they need. General tax revenues pay for most of the roadways and road repairs in the United States, not the tax on gasoline, so the automotive industry which paid for Romney’s affluent youth is a major beneficiary of government favor. The nuclear industry exists only through government subsidies and loan guarantees. Our economy’s financial sector, which garners 40 percent of corporate profits, would have imploded but for massive government bailouts.

In short, most of the 47 percent who pay no income tax are hard-working Americans or people dependent on Social Security after a lifetime of hard work. The very rich, by contrast, benefit from government favors out of all proportion to their economic and social contributions.

September 18, 2012

This week's Election Tuesday post is by Ian Bogost, author of Persuasive Games and Newsgames(with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer), among others. It discusses political games and communication (or lack thereof).

Recently, the journalist Monroe Anderson asked Obama strategist David Axelrod “why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the
first two years of his first term.” Axelrod's response: “information gridlock.”
Essentially, the White House hadn't been able to communicate effectively with
the public about its accomplishments. Anderson siphoned this state
of affairs through the lens of games, asking two speakers on a newsgames panel
at a journalism conference how games might be used to communicate “Obamacare”
more effectively. The two responses are pretty good game designs. One involves
simulating the experience of different illnesses: “Let them walk through and let
them see it with the Obamacare version and without the Obamacare version, not
telling them which is and which isn't.” The other is a game about “how to
survive without health insurance...People will say, 'Oh, wow'; if these things
happened to me, I'd be screwed.”

In the presidential election of 2004, Gonzalo
Frasca and I helped create the first ever official US presidential candiate
game, for then-Democratic sweetheart Howard Dean. Several more officially
endorsed games appeared that election cycle. In 2008, only a couple surfaced,
including Pork Invaders, a silly Space Invaders knock-off from the McCain
campaign. This year, as far as I know, not a single official political game was
conceived or created. Meanwhile, the two designs Anderson's panelists suggest
are just the sort I love, just the sort I have been advocating for in my
research and my game development for years. The problem is this: neither the
Obama White House nor the Obama campaign would ever make games like the ones
Anderson's interviewees suggest. That's not because the designs are bad;
ironically, it's because they are good. As I've arguedbefore,
the representation of policy choices and their outcomes is anathema to politics,
because the latter is concerned more with politicking than with
policy, with campaigning over legislating. This is a different sort of
failure to communicate, one rooted in the widespread misconception of politics
as a matter of professionals getting, keeping, or losing their jobs, rather than
citizens living in (hopefully) better and better communities. Meanwhile, the
administration and the campaigns alike keep Facebooking and Tweeting their
soundbites, hoping two sentence answers will be enough.

Five
of the U.S.A’s 55 presidential elections were won by a candidate other than the
wish of the electorate—and almost equally damning, in at least twelve the
winner was doubtful—three of them within the last century. Woodrow Wilson was
elected in 1912 with 42 percent of the votes, but Theodore Roosevelt and William Taft
received together over 50 percent: had Wilson run against either one alone, he would
most likely have lost. Bill Clinton was the winner with 43 percent in 1992, yet
together George Bush and Ross Perot polled 56 percent: pitted alone against Clinton
the evidence shows Bush would have won. In 2000 George W. Bush defeated Al
Gore, but had Ralph Nader not been a candidate in Florida most of his 97
thousand votes would have gone to Gore, giving him the state, so the election
with 291 Electoral votes to Bush’s 246.

Why
can the electorate’s will be denied? Because of majority voting: Picking one single
candidate among many denies a voter the right to express even the simplest
opinion concerning the worth of any candidate.
She votes for one—he is, in her estimation, excellent, very good or merely
acceptable, though she is unable to
say so—and she can express absolutely nothing about whether any other is good, poor or simply to reject.

Early
prognoses promise a close election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in
2012, some twenty-two other candidates are on the ballots of one or more
states, with the Libertarian Gary Johnson on those of at least 44 states with
493 Electoral votes and the Green Jill Stein on those of at least 32 states
with 403 votes. The errors of 1912, 1992, 2000 and before may well occur again.
Even if this year’s election was a two-man race the “wrong” man could win since
majority voting bars any evaluation whatsoever.

What
can be done? The remedy is simple. Elect presidents by “majority judgment.” A
voter evaluates every candidate as either excellent,
very good, good, acceptable, poor or to
reject. The majority opinion determines which of these grades to assign
each candidate. The grades rank the candidates, the one with the highest grade wins.
Why this is the best known method of election is explained in the book, Majority Judgment: Measuring, Ranking and
Electing, where the many theoretical reasons for using this system of
election are developed and confirmed by extensive descriptions of uses and
experiments.

June 27, 2012

June is Children’s Awareness Month in the United States. To celebrate, here are a few titles that talk about children—where they live, how they are raised, what they play--and why (or why not) we have them.

Children Without a State, edited by Jacqueline Bhabha, is the first book to address children’s statelessness and lack of legal status as a human rights issue.

Edited by Julie Dunlap and Stephen R. Kellert, Companions in Wonder is an anthology of adventures with children in the natural world, from capturing fireflies to encountering a grizzly bear.

Engineering Play by Mizuko Ito explains how the influential industry that produced such popular games as Oregon Trail and KidPix emerged from experimental efforts to use computers as tools in child-centered learning.

Parentonomics by Joshua Gans talks about what every parent needs to know about negotiating, incentives, outsourcing, and other strategies to solve the economic management problem that is parenting.

Christine Overall’s Why Have Children is a wide-ranging exploration of whether or not choosing to procreate can be morally justified--and if so, how.